The Financial Times highlights a new study that shows researchers have algorithms with good predictive power for traits you haven’t revelaed on Facebook.
Tag Archives: Facebook
Social network analysis: “The Friendster Autopsy”
A group of researchers has provided an autopsy of Friendster:
Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign crushed it…
What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.
“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling,” Garcia told us during an online chat…
The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have “resilience and social influence,” Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.
This sounds like a classic social network analysis: are there enough strong bonds in a large network to keep it together? As they note, it is not just about the number of users involved but rather the relationships and interactions between key groups that have an outsized influence on the entire network.
I suspect Facebook (and other social network people) has some idea about this idea already. What I would want to hear about is how then Facebook helps keep these “k-cores” or hubs or key nodes together. Are the algorithms for news feeds geared toward these people or groups? How are things tweaked to help these k-cores grow and continue to have an outsized influence?
Pew finds majority of Americans taking breaks from Facebook
Facebook may be near ubiquitous in the United States but Pew finds that a majority of users take breaks from the site:
New research suggests that Facebook fatigue may be setting in with some users. Twenty-seven percent of Facebook users surveyed in the U.S. plan to spend less time on the site in 2013, compared with only 3% who plan to spend more time, according to a study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
(Another 69% of Facebook users say they plan to spend the same amount of time on the site this coming year.)
The Pew study also found that 61% of Facebook users have taken a break from the service for several weeks or more. During these breaks, the vast majority of Facebook vacationers don’t delete their profiles…
The reasons people gave for taking a sabbatical from the network were varied. The most common motivation was not having enough time for the site, with 21% of people saying they were just too busy with real-life responsibilities to spend time reading posts, liking and commenting.
Other reasons for leaving: Ten percent called it a waste of time, 10% cited a lack of interest in the content, and 9% said they were unhappy with the amount of drama and gossip on the site. Only 4% of people mentioned privacy and security concerns as their reason for taking a breather.
These findings could counter a common narrative about Facebook use that is based in some real trends. It suggests Facebook users and Internet users in general spend way too much time online, can’t get away from it, and end up in weird and possibly harmful situations (see: Manti Te’o story). The suggestion is that users don’t realize the possibly harmful effects of being on Facebook. These findings counter this narrative: a majority of users do try to get away from it at times. They are not unaware of what is going on and try to get some distance from it.
On the other hand, I don’t think this is necessarily bad news for Facebook. This could simply be a plateauing of a sharp upward rise for Facebook that was untenable over the long haul. In other words, perhaps people simply can’t maintain the amount of time they spend with Facebook or realize they don’t want to. Some people just joined because others have joined. Yet, these findings suggest that people aren’t leaving Facebook altogether even as they take some short breaks. They are trying to find ways to balance their lives with Facebook and still want to participate, even on a reduced basis.
So how much might Facebook do to try to reduce these breaks and have people participating consistently?
Mapping NFL fandom by county with Facebook likes
Facebook has put their massive data trove to use and examined the geographies of NFL fandom. Here is what they came up with:
The National Football League is one of the most popular sports in America with some incredibly devoted fans. At Facebook we have about 35 million account holders in the United States who have Liked a page for one of the 32 teams in the league, representing one of the most comprehensive samples of sports fanship ever collected. Put another way, more than 1 in 10 Americans have declared their support for an NFL team on Facebook…
While winning seems to matter, NFL teams have local followings that are probably heavily influenced by family ties and/or where a person grew up, so we were obviously curious to see where the fans for various teams live now. By considering the physical locations of NFL fans, we can construct a map of the top team for each county in the US. It tells an interesting story about the ways that football rivalries and allegiances alternately divide and unite the country, and sometimes even individual states.
In some cases, whole states and even entire regions of the country uniformly support a single team. For instance the Vikings are easily the only game in town in Minnesota, while New England appears to be comprised of entirely Patriots fans except for a small portion of Connecticut.
There are some states which are divided into regions by teams. Florida has three teams–the Tampa Bay Bucs, Miami Dolphins, and the Jacksonville Jaguars–and Facebook users there seems fractured in their support, with some counties even defecting to teams from the North. Ohio is another interesting story, with the Cleveland Browns in the North, Cincinatti Bengals in the South, and Pittsburgh Steelers fans occupying the middle of the state.
Some teams, like the Steelers, Cowboys, and Packers, seem to transcend geography, with pockets of fans all over the country. On the other end of the spectrum, the Jets have to share New York with the Giants and are only the most popular team for a single stronghold county in Long Island.
Five quick thoughts:
1. There are few other organizations that could put together such a map without undertaking a major survey (since this is measured at the county level).
2. The best part for Facebook: users voluntarily provided this data.
3. Could Facebook end up being the most important future source for telling us about American society? There are still difficulties: users have to opt in (in this particular case, they had to “like” a NFL team), not everyone is involved (though it seems like pretty close), and not all users are putting everything in their profiles.
4. Is there a way to weight this map with population density? For example, the Cowboys may have a really broad geographic reach but many of those counties have fewer people. In contrast, teams like the Jets or Eagles have smaller reaches yet more people live in those areas.
5. Is there a way to show the percentage of county respondents who liked the dominant team? I imagine there are plenty of counties where one team does not have a strong majority, let alone even much of a plurality. For example, Jets fans barely show up on the map because they are only the top team in one county. Yet, there are plenty of Jets fans.
Reminder from Manti Te’o saga: few people are “Catfished” online
The unfolding of the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax story has been both strange and fascinating. Here is one thing we should take away from Te’o’s experience: few people online are in danger of experiencing something similar, of being “Catfished.” In a statement issued by Te’o on Wednesday, January 16, here is his second to last sentence:
If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was.
People should use common sense online. But, we know that many users of the Internet and of common social networking sites like Facebook are not there to meet strangers and begin relationships. Rather, most users are interested in connecting with people they already know or people who might be inside a common circle, say, part of an incoming college freshman class or who are part of a larger organization. To be “Catfished” means that an Internet user would have to seek out some of these relationships with unknown or random people. Since many people are not seeking this out or responding to the occasional odd request, this is not a huge problem for the general population of Internet users. While the movie Catfishpresents such a scenario and MTV has a show with the same name and theme, this does not mean it is a common occurrence.
“Faith in the Age of Facebook” published online by Sociology of Religion
Along with my co-authors Peter Mundey and Jon Hill, a new article I co-wrote was published online a few days ago by Sociology of Religion. The paper is titled “Faith in the Age of Facebook: Exploring the Links Between Religion and Social Network Site Membership and Use” and here is the abstract:
This study examines how religiousness influences social network site (SNS) membership and frequency of use for emerging adults between 18 and 23 years old utilizing Wave 3 survey data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Independent of religion promoting a prosocial orientation, organizational involvement, and civic engagement, Catholics and Evangelical Protestants are more likely than the “not religious” to be SNS members, and more Bible reading is associated with lower levels of SNS membership and use. We argue there are both sacred and secular influences on SNS involvement, and social behaviors, such as being in school and participating in more non-religious organizations, generally positively influence becoming a SNS member, yet certain more private behaviors, such as Bible reading, donating money, and helping the needy, lessen SNS participation. We also suggest four areas for future research to help untangle the influence of religiousness on SNS use and vice versa.
Study finds significant overlap of online Facebook friends and offline friendships
On Facebook, all of these complex and differentiated relationships get collapsed — flattened — under the label “friend.” But researchers at UC San Diego wanted to see whether it could figure out — just from people’s Facebook activity — who their closest friends were. They asked a survey group to list their close friends and then, using a model based on comments, messages, wall posts, likes, photo tags, etc. tried to see if they could say whether any given pair of people were close. They could do so accurately 84 percent of the time. These Facebook clues are “successful proxies for such real-world tie strength.”
Jason J. Jones, one of the study’s lead authors, say the findings contradict the common belief that people use Facebook to keep in touch with those whom they would otherwise lose touch with and use other means of communication (such as the phone) for their closest relationships. Rather, Facebook is just another space in which our social lives take place. The researchers found that comments were the most revealing of a friendship’s strength, followed by messages, wall posts, and likes. Least revealing were demographic information, such as having had the same employer or gone to the same school, and being invited to join the same Facebook groups. Additionally, the study’s authors found that public interactions such as comments and wall posts were just as revealing as private messages.
“This is a useful study even if it comes from the ‘duh’ department,” writes social-media theorist Nathan Jurgenson over email. “The notion that the Internet is, or ever really was, some other, cyber, space, is wrong headed.” In other words, of course our Facebook interactions reveal the reality of our friendships — they are part and parcel to our friendships. There aren’t two separate spheres of online and offline, but one continuous reality, which is at various points augmented by technology — the phone or Facebook, for examples — or the tools of the voice, gestures, and facial expressions. Terms like “real world,” “virtual world,” and “IRL,” which the study’s authors rely on heavily, undermine a better understanding of this integration.
This corroborates a consistent finding in academic work about Facebook and social networking sites: users don’t go out and meet a bunch of “random” other users. Rather, they tend to reproduce existing friendship and social networks in the online world. Some of these relationships might have faded away in the past, like making friends with people from grade school or past jobs, but much of the online interaction is a continuation of the interaction that is taking place offline.
The article does contain an interesting ending:
This is all follows pretty neatly from Jurgenson’s point that Facebook is a tool that augments our one reality, not a separate reality altogether. If we understand that Facebook is a space where our friendships occur and develop, we can begin to think about what the contours of that space do to us.
In other words, putting existing relationships in the online sphere can shape these relationships in unique ways. Thus, there is a two-way interaction going on: Facebook allows people to interact but it also shapes that interaction and what might be possible down the road in that relationship.
A mid-twentieth century vision of “the future” versus welcome changes to everyday life for average Americans
Forget the big, obvious things like Internet search, GPS, smartphones or molecularly targeted cancer treatments. Compared with the real 21st century, old projections of The Future offered a paucity of fundamentally new technologies. They included no laparoscopic surgery or effective acne treatments or ADHD medications or Lasik or lithotripsy — to name just a few medical advances that don’t significantly affect life expectancy…
Nor was much business innovation evident in those 20th century visions. The glamorous future included no FedEx or Wal- Mart, no Starbucks or Nike or Craigslist — culturally transformative enterprises that use technology but derive their real value from organization and insight. Nobody used shipping containers or optimized supply chains. The manufacturing revolution that began at Toyota never happened. And forget about such complex but quotidian inventions as wickable fabrics or salad in a bag.
The point isn’t that people in the past failed to predict all these innovations. It’s that people in the present take them for granted.
Technologists who lament the “end of the future” are denigrating the decentralized, incremental advances that actually improve everyday life. And they’re promoting a truncated idea of past innovation: economic history with railroads but no department stores, radio but no ready-to-wear apparel, vaccines but no consumer packaged goods, jets but no plastics.
I wonder if another way to categorize this would be to say that many of the changes in recent decades have been more about quality of life, not significantly different way of doing things or viewing the world (outside of the Internet). Quality of life is harder to measure but if we take the long view, the average life of a middle-class American today contains improvements over decades before. Also, is this primarily a history or perspective issue? History tends to be told (and written) by people in charge who often focus on the big people and moments. It is harder to track, understand, and analyze what the “average” person experiences day to day.
I can imagine some might see Postrel’s argument and suggest we are deluded by some of these quality of life improvements and we forget about what we have given up. While some of this might be mythologizing about a golden era that never quite was, it is common to hear such arguments about the Internet and Facebook: it brings new opportunities but fundamentally changes how humans interact with each other and machines (see Alone Together by Sherry Turkle). We now have Amazon and Walmart but have lost any relationships with small business owners and community shops. We may have Starbucks coffee but it may not be good for us.
The rise of misattributed quotes on the Internet, social media
An editor at RealClearPolitics examines an erroneous online list of Mark Twain quotes and takes a broad view of quotes in the age of the Internet and social media:
The point of this example is that lists of quotes without specific and verifiable citations — where and when it appeared — are useless, and invariably rife with errors. Websites with names like “Brainyquote” and “Thinkexist.com” are essentially Internet compost piles.
In the pre-Internet days, “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” and “The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations” were the gold standards, although sometimes misattributed quotes found their way into those volumes. Much of this material is now online, but the best source of accurate quotes today is the “Yale Book of Quotations,” edited by the rigorous and charming Fred R. Shapiro.
Many of the most frequently misquoted historical figures have websites devoted to keeping the record straight for their heroes. These range from one established by a conscientious amateur Twain aficionada named Barbara Schmidt to WinstonChurchill.org, which is run by the Churchill Centre and Museum in London. The latter site even has a section called “Quotes Falsely Attributed.”
In his anthology, Shapiro goes the extra mile in tracking down the origin of erroneous quotes. Thus, he is no stranger to the misuse of quotations or even obvious forgeries. But even he was astonished at the casual speciousness of the Huffington Post inventory.
This has been a widespread issue in recent years – remember the fake MLK viral quote after the death of Osama bin Laden? While Wikipedia might have relatively good information that is regularly edited, quotations are simply floating around the Internet and social media.
I think this is tied to two other phenomena related to the Internet and social media:
1. The desire people have to find a quote that represents them. In an era of profiles and status updates, people are defined more and more by short, snappy bursts. There is simply not space to write more and who wants to read a long piece about your existence (except on blogs)? Finding the right sentence or two that sums up one’s existence or current state is a difficult task that can be aided with quotes attributed to famous figures. If you don’t want to use quotes, you can always use pictures – witness the rise of Instagram.
2. Many of these quotes are inspirational or witty. If you look at the inspirational quotes on Facebook profiles or Twitter feeds, many suggest people are continually facing and then overcoming challenges and obstacles. The overcoming-type quotes are empowering as individuals can quickly equate their challenges to some of the greatest in history. The witty quotes do something else; they suggest the user is facing life with verve and can find and wield profound words. Witty quotes can then become another status game as users try to one-up each other with piercing and whimsical takes on the world.
Perhaps this is how the average person gets to participate on a daily basis in a sound bite culture.
Highlights from the Nielsen Social Media Report 2012
Nielsen just released the Social Media Report 2012 (more data here). Here are a few things to note:
Facebook remains the most-visited social network in the U.S. via PC (152.2 million visitors), mobile apps (78.4 million users) and mobile web (74.3 million visitors), and is multiple times the size of the next largest social site across each platform. The site is also the top U.S. web brand in terms of time spent, as some 17 percent of time spent online via personal computer is on Facebook.
-More than 70% of Pinterest’s users are female.
-The top three reasons by far for why social networks users become connected/friends: know person in real life, interested in keeping up, mutual friends. This is more evidence that social networks are mainly about maintaining existing connections rather than creating new connections.
-Watching TV is increasingly linked to tablet, smartphone, and Twitter usage. Multitasking is alive and well and perhaps TV can be interactive after all.
There is also some fascinating data at the end about social media usage around the world.
Legally Sociable 